Writing Stories: Using Patterns to Master More Complex Structures

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What is a story? Nothing more than an orderly telling of a tale in a way that the audience understands and appreciates enough to want to see how it ends.

We're used to thinking about stories in terms of fables, novels or movies, but when children write a report about an inquiry-based project, they're really telling a story about their discoveries. A poem is a story, even if it's just a story about an emotion felt for only a minute. It's cliché, but it's true: Every picture tells a story. When you have kids create multimedia presentations, animation, a video or a Web page, they need storytelling skills to keep the viewer engaged and interested. 

Pattern Writing for Stories

Pattern writing activities don't have to be limited to simple forms or to practicing basic skills. You can build on them to begin teaching more complex models that form the basis for learning storytelling and how to organize ideas. Particularly with older kids (but certainly not exclusively), you'll want to try broader, more sophisticated patterns from books, songs and poetry. 

Organizing Stories

The heart of writing a story is identifying the main ideas behind it and the order in which they'll be presented. If kids can learn to do that, they are more then halfway to becoming good writers and communicators. You can use many tools to organize stories, including several graphic organizers that we've discussed before. Below are some that you can use for different purposes:

    • Target-style maps are perhaps the most versatile organization tool, especially for coming up with the initial kernel of an idea and for working in teams. 

    • Webbing can help clarify thoughts around a central topic and are an excellent middle stage for organizing main ideas before attempting a detailed outline.

    • The hierarchical structure of traditional outlines is important when working on written pieces that are longer than a paragraph or whenever the sequencing of points and subpoints is important, such as in multipage Web projects or slide presentations. Sometimes the hardest thing for kids to grasp is keeping related points together and progressing toward a conclusion. Outlining can help once kids are old enough to grasp the concept of hierarchies and subsets.

      Most popular word processing, presentation and multimedia programs come with built-in outlining features that can make this task much easier to manage. One of the main disadvantages of traditional organizational forms, such as outlines and Venn diagrams, has been that their rigid structures made it difficult to make changes and adaptations, but today's software tools eliminate much of that problem.

Understanding Sequence

Once you know the heart of your story, the next big challenge is to figure out the sequence in which you'll tell it. For a straightforward writing project like an essay, this task may be taken care of entirely in the outlining stage, but multimedia projects—whether a Web page, animation, video, presentation or print book with pictures—require the author to think through the interplay of words and pictures and how each will work together to carry the story.

Most professionals use a storyboard to illustrate the sequence. A storyboard is a series of quick sketches that reveal the activity of a story. A storyboard for a video is slightly different from a storyboard for a Web page because the two media have different characteristics, but the basic concept is fundamentally the same. (A Web page needs links, for example, and a video needs to specify the position of lights, but those are minor differences.) Long before you're ready to have kids create storyboards, however, try a panel book activity. You'll need a panel book for the storyboarding project, but panel books also are a great technique for teaching reading, vocabulary and basic design and for helping kids to focus on the stories they read.